Gadgets, Utensils and Appliances

Why oh why are we obsessed with gadgetry in the kitchen? Most are supposed to ease a problem that no one has. I saw this one just yesterday:

The worst thing about cooking is touching or smelling like food

Now, a lot of things in my kitchen do just one thing, but they do it to many kinds of foods. Knives cut, peelers peel, blenders blend. Sometimes novelty spatulas are shaped as to ruin any utility:

What the hell am I supposed to do with a squirrel shaped spatula??

The gadgets come in when there is one task that you were never shown how to do properly. Egg separators are a good example. Sometimes we need just egg whites, but how to do we separate the yolk without breaking it? You could use an egg separator to catch the yolk, or carefully pick up the yolk with a water bottle, or you can do what chefs do:

Boom! That's one less gadget in the drawer. Some gadgets are worth it, like my garlic press and citrus zester, but there are dozens of one-task gadgets that you'll want to avoid. I don't know about you, but with my tiny kitchen, I need all my drawer space for utensils.

Three drawers and a utensil jar to be precise

Whip It

One way you'll know something is a utensil is if you might use it every day. I keep as many utensils where I can get at them quickly, and any other occasional-use tools go in a separate drawer. Your favorite foods and cooking habits may be different from mine, but some things are useful for every cook.
This is a short list of essential kitchen tools (play a seek-and-find game with the above image):
Knife set,
Large bowl,
2 smaller bowls,
Measuring cup and/or cups,
Measuring spoons,
Cooking spatula (AKA "turner"),
Silicone spatula (AKA "scraper"),
Peeler, 

Wooden mixing spoon,

Slotted spoon,

Ladle,

Whisk,

Kitchen shears,

Colander,

Sieve,
Grater/Shredder,

Can opener,

Tongs
Rolling pin
Oven mitts/pot holders
Apron

If you're still whipping eggs with a fork, a whisk is much better. If you're scraping all your bowls with a metal serving spoon, buy a nice spatula (a regular one, not a squirrel-shaped one.) Preparing food with nothing but tableware is a frustration you don't need when learning to cook all your own meals. Gather a few essentials you  might be putting off.

Electric Boogaloo

The most expensive things in your kitchen probably run on electricity. Toasters are ubiquitous. Everyone has a microwave now, but big or small, it's only going to be good for a few things, not meals. The three machines I wouldn't want to do without now are my blender, toaster oven and Kitchenaid stand mixer.

A blender is a blender, don't be fooled by "wave technology" or "bullet" designs. The rule of thumb is the more you pay for it, the less likely the motor or other moving parts will break. Glass is easier to clean than plastic, but is heavier. I've had good luck with Oster, but that's not an endorsement, just don't buy the cheapest blender at the store.

My toaster oven takes up a lot of counter space, but I use it every week. The convenience of toasting or baking small amounts of things on a digitally timed cycle with predictable temperature control is amazing. It saves time and energy, it doesn't heat my whole kitchen in summer, and I can use it when my oven is already occupied. I still use my oven for baking cakes, roasts, rise-in-oven pizzas, or pastries, but when I want freezer to oven entrees like breaded fish fillets or chicken strips, it's so nice to set the timer and walk away knowing they won't over-bake.

"There are many like it, but this one is mine."

Last but importantly, my KitchenAid stand mixer is the most used appliance I own. There are other brands, yes, but KitchenAid dominates the stand mixer market because of reliability. If you're on a budget, an electric hand-mixer at a tenth the price works just as well for many things, with a little more time and effort. But if you can save up, even the base model or a used KitchenAid can do things the hand mixers can't, like knead pizza dough and stir thick cookie dough.

That's all for now. Make the best use of the space and time you have. Remember you're cooking for health and connection to your food. Avoid lazy gadgetry and buy the most useful tools for your collection. 

Food Fails pt 2

While I was doing more research into more Food Fails, I had the following conversation with my wife, Laura:

L "Do you have to stand there and stir it the whole time?"
Me "Yes."
L "Why? It seems dumb that you have to stand over it."
Me "Most cream sauces like gravy have to be stirred the whole time or they'll cook unevenly and burn."
L "Oh, I didn't know that."

It's here that I realized I was going about my research the wrong way. Food Fails are pictures of food that was almost okay. I need to start where the fear begins, where the fires start. I need to go all the way back to grilled cheese.

Starter foods

I don't know an adult that cannot make a grilled cheese, even if it's a bad one. My wife is afraid of cooking most things, but not grilled cheese because it's a very simple recipe:

2 slices of bread

1 slice of cheese (probably a plastic wrapped "cheese single")

Butter

Place any size skillet over fire. Butter both slices of bread. Place one slice butter-side down on skillet, stack unwrapped cheese on top, and add second slice of bread butter-side up. Check underside using a spatula. Crap, it's already burning. Flip sandwich and turn heat down to low. Wait 30 seconds. Is the cheese melting? Yes? Good. Is the bottom tan? Kinda? It's done. It's a little darker on one side, but you can scrape that off. Flip onto plate and cut corner-to-corner. TURN OFF STOVE.

Seriously, you always burn the first one.

It's hard to mess up because grilled cheese is made by you, for you. Or maybe for your little brother. You've probably made this dozens of times and you can still eat it even if it's not perfect. The problem comes in where there are more ingredients and more variables. Without the previous experience, a new cook can make bad choices right out of the gate.

Bad Choice #1 - Walking Away

Whether it's putting a pizza in the oven without setting a timer, or answering the phone when you're frying some vegetables, walking away when you are cooking is how we get charring. In my first post I talked a lot about how hot or cool things needed to be, then about time management and planning ahead. Now let's talk about minutes and seconds.

Everything about cooking is applying the right kind of heat for the right amount of time. What you don't have time for when you're cooking is distractions and hangups. Did your mother often shoo you out of the kitchen when she was cooking? This wasn't to keep you safe, this was to make sure she didn't get distracted when she was making dinner. Or interrupt her ten minute wine break. Either way, she was working on a time-sensitive product and needed to control the environment. How many sauces have been burned or cookies over-baked because of crying coming from another room? Children burn more dinners from outside the kitchen than any new cooks standing in front of the stove.

When you control the situation, you can cook anything you set your mind to. Don't walk away from lit fires, turn them down or off if you have to leave them for more than a few seconds. Buy a timer and use for anything that cooks over 10 minutes, but always cook meats to temp, not time. Buy a thermometer.

Quick Tip: If anything starts smoking (such as burned popcorn) dump it into a metal bowl and pop it in the freezer; it arrests the cooking and stops the smoking. I learned this working at a [Major Retailer] snack bar with a 550F popcorn kettle. That distinctive smell got all over the store a few times a week before I taught everyone this trick.

Bad Choice #2 - TL;DR

Read your recipes all the way to the end, taking note of the verbs and adverbs. You don't want to be halfway through cooking something and then notice the word "blanch" or "julienne" and think you somehow printed out something about The Golden Girls. You also might want to walk through the steps in your head and make sure you have everything clean and ready, because the word "drain" indicates you need a clean colander ready for your rapidly over-cooking pasta. I only did this a few dozen times before I discovered the "al dente" cooking time on the box is better than the "sure, that looks done" time. Cooking is in the verbs, so use this list for reference.

Bad Choice #3 - Cooking Alone

Never be afraid to call for help - to the other room or your mother's house. Chances are someone you know has been there before. If you suddenly need an ingredient you forgot to buy, it's rarely a big deal to ask a neighbor for an egg or a cup of milk. We may not live in a Leave It To Beaver world anymore, but everyone has been there and it's a good excuse to introduce yourself. As a beggar. Pity is an over-looked virtue these days.

Don't give up

Remember that failure is not a total loss if you learned something. Don't let fear of failure keep you from trying new foods and eating healthier meals. Practice cooking with friends and family. Make special nights of it. Bonding over a well cooked meal is the birthright of every human on this earth since we learned how to make fire. Don't let a few decades of modern convenience and fast food steal that away from you.

care and keeping of sharps

I'm back to cooking blogger mode to talk about my favorite tools in the kitchen: knives. A good, sharp knife is necessary to divide large food into smaller, manageable chunks. Or bites. Or bits. Knife skills are a cornerstone of cooking and you can't get around it unless you want to buy pre-cut frozen everything for the rest of your life, and of course you don't because your freezer barely holds three frozen pizzas and a handle of vodka half-filled ice cube tray. So to move forward, you'll have to follow me into the danger zone.

Unlike this guy, I am not responsible for any training accidents.

First thing, I need you to get over your fear of cutting yourself. It's a childish fear that was instilled in you at a young age and you just need to grow up. Just kidding. Cutting yourself can seriously slow down or even halt a meal production and you need to be careful. What you really need to remember is you are less likely to cut yourself with a sharp knife than a dull one. Dull knives require more force to use, and the blade can deflect sideways right into the fingers you were hoping to keep scar-free. Less force, greater control, less time and human-blood-free meals. That's a win-win-win-win. To keep them sharp, you'll need a honing steel.

Listen to Alton Brown explain how use a honing steel in less than one minute:

Did you hear what he said at the end? Leave sharpening "to the professionals", if you can. Commercial "sharpeners" will ruin your knives. If the honing steel isn't working anymore, or you've chipped a blade, a whet stone sharpening kit is the only way to properly sharpen a knife at home. Remember, a sharpener removes metal, so the more you use it, closer you get to having to replace a knife (which isn't terrible, I love knife shopping.) This video is a perfect demonstration of the technique.

The next part of taking care of your knives is the cutting surface. Never use a glass or stone cutting board. Those materials are too hard and will dull or even blunt your knives in a very short time. Wood cutting boards are the best, but they get a bad reputation because they are porous, and that supposedly makes them unsanitary. That is a myth, and lifehacker.com can set your mind at ease: "there's no significant antibacterial benefit from using a plastic cutting board over a wood one." My personal favorite (because I have very limited counter space) is my 18.5"x12" plastic Architec Gripper cutting board, which is big enough to lay across my sink or stove top and doesn't slide around because the bottom is covered with rubber feet. (Unfortunately, it appears the company only makes up to an 14"x11" size now.)

Lastly, the Dos and Don'ts list:

• Don't keep your knives in a drawer where they will rub up against each other. Use the a knife block or magnet strip for storage.
• Do check your handles for cracks, especially after dropping them, as the blade could come loose on some knives.
• Don't buy "miracle" blades or any other cheap "As Seen On TV" knives.
• Do consider knives an investment and look to spend about $80-100 on a good set. They will last forever if you take care of them.
• Don't leave your knives soaking in water and do hand wash them right after each use. The blades can rust if left in water, and a dishwasher detergent can damage blades and wooden handles.
• Do read the appendix if you have specific questions about what knives to look for.

Summary Appendix of Knives

This Wikipedia article covers at least twenty times the technical information about knives than I am going to cover here. If you rather skip my terrible jokes and movie references, you can read it instead and be a knife nerd like me. Consider this the TL;DR summary.

The first sharp knife anyone knows is the Chef's knife. This is the knife that your grandma used to chop carrots for stew, your dad used to carve the turkey at Thanksgiving, and last thing Janet Leigh saw in "Psycho." You know, your all-purpose knife. Professional chefs will spend hundreds of hours practicing with this one knife and will use it for almost everything. It can be intimidating and unwieldy for beginners, but it will get you through more meal preps for less money than any other knife.

However, the Chef's knife is falling out of style in some American kitchens and being replaced by the fancier sounding Santoku, or "three uses" knife. The three uses are slicing, dicing and mincing; that is cutting vegetables into big pieces, small pieces, and little bits. A few knife sets now have this knife instead of a Chef's. But, then what do you use for meat?

A boning knife. This is usually the first knife you reach for to open a letter or use as a screwdriver. It can also cut raw meat better than most any other knife. Boning knives have a fine curved tip, and assuming you haven't already forgotten what I said about sharpness, it will separate skin and bone from your meat products more easily than a Chef's knife because of the short, slender blade.

A standard set of kitchen knives comes with a bread knife, but you need it only for soft bread. Sure, its 10 inch serrated edge seams to be designed for sawing through the outer crust of artisan breads, but I've found a sharp straight edge will cut baguettes and bagels more cleanly. The bread knife is designed for soft homemade bread and rolls; hard crust or dense breads have the structure to resist squishing under the additional pressure required by straight edge knives.

The last essential is the paring knife. This is a mini-Chef's knife used to cut fruit and remove seeds. Sometimes called a peeler, the knife is also used to make garnishes and cut cheese. Its name is linked to where we get the word "pre-pare", as in to cut away unwanted bits from food before it is served. Get into the habit of saying you are "preparing" the food instead of "making" it; it sounds better and reminds you that this food will be presented to others and they damn well better respect your efforts.

Food Fails

I still don't know what I want to be. Today I am a food blogger. Tomorrow I'll probably write something esoteric about the moral structure of Kurosawa movies, but today I'm talking about Food Fails.

Lists like these are pure schadenfreude. Someone sees a lovely bit of Food Porn, or Pinterest photo perfection and think "I can do that, I own a hand mixer!" Even with step-by-step photo illustrations, people across the internet are sharing their frustration with cooks holding back the keys to producing professional looking results. I want to address a few things that are leading to so many failures in our internet-enabled kitchens.

1 - Heating and Cooling

This is number one because most of these projects could have been saved with proper heat or proper cooling. Frying foods (especially eggs) requires an understanding of heat and flame that most people do not possess. Your stove might have markings that read "High-Med-Low/Simmer", but unless you know how much heat those settings produce with your personal cookware, you are going too make a mess of things very quickly.  According to the National Fire Protection Association, 40% of all house fires are caused by cooking related incidents. I would wager that most had the heat too high.

If you haven't already removed the battery ages ago.

What your stove is trying to tell you:
High: Boil Water/Burn everything else. Also useful if you can cook with a Wok without burning your house down.
Med-High = Always be stirring or covering. As soon as things start to burn, TURN IT OFF.
This setting is suggested by every skillet-ready frozen dinner on the market and assumes that A. you have a non-stick skillet of at least 12" and B. that skillet has a lid. "Keep covered" and "stir frequently" are best combination to ensure a nervous cook burns a meal that still has frozen bits in it.
Medium: The breakfast setting. Pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage - Everything cooks through, everything thing is... still burned if you turn your back for a minute. Keep an eye on it and turn it down a bit if you see smoke.
Low: Sauces, Custards and Candy. Most people have never used low heat because no one makes their own sauce from scratch, Americans like boxed pudding mix, and candy is mass produced, so why bother? You bother because it's very relaxing to cook a cup of hot chocolate from milk, cocoa powder, sugar and a pinch of salt. You bother because hollandaise sauce is fantastic and has to be made fresh. You bother because you have to melt the candy coating for cake-pops and pretzel dips. So, there are a few things.

The other side of the coin is cooling. Anyone can make a cake these days. The boxes of mix are cheap, the pans are cheap, the instructions are easy. But then why are there so many cake disasters? Cake after miserable cake has the frosting sliding off sides or melting out of the middle. The key word here is melting.

The last thing written on the cake mix box is "cool completely before frosting". Most people have no idea how long this can take. As seen here, rack cooling is the fastest method, but how long to wait? In winter, 40% humidity and 65F in kitchen means it should be cool enough in an hour of cooling on a rack. Summer? 80% humidity and 80F in the kitchen could add another hour. You can also use an instant thermometer to be sure it isn't still leaking heat and moisture from the center.
What kind of frosting are you using? Canned frosting should not melt below 80F, but can be hard to spread below 60F. Butter cream frosting has to be kept in an icewater bath when it's being mixed and applied. After decorating, all cakes need to be refrigerated immediately to stiffen the frosting and avoid a Dali-esque surrealist cake. Buy a cake cover or container and make room in the fridge before you begin decorating.

2 - Time and Laziness

The other problem with something that looks easy is that professionals have years of skill and experience on their side. I can't count how many pie crusts I've over-worked and cookies I've burned over the years. Take every step and instruction seriously. Notice how much I've written so far? That's just first and final steps in a recipe. What about "cook, but do not boil"? What about "If dough is too stiff, add 1 Tbsp water"? Experience is the only way of knowing the difference between "golden brown" and "caramelized" just by looking at a pan a cookies. What you need is guidance and practice.

Guidance is not "Google it". That how we get falling cakes and burned dinners. No, you need to find someone that has been successful preparing what you're trying to serve. Don't be embarrassed to ask your grandmother to show you around her favorite meal preparations. Most cooks learn from doing, and we are now two generations removed from people that did most of their cooking from scratch. Healthy cooking starts with learning how to cook from fresh, basic ingredients. Don't let fear of failure keep you from learning a life-skill that will pay off every generation that it is passed down. Learning to cook could affect the quality of life for your great-grandchildren if you make it a family tradition now.

Practice before you present. If you're cooking for your new boyfriend for the first time, cooking Thanksgiving dinner for 12, or baking a Thomas the Tank Engine cake for your nephew, do a dry run ahead of time on anything you've never previously attempted. If you get a less than stellar result, go over the steps again, and if need be, find a similar recipe that others have tried with greater success. Don't rush into something with too little time and expect everything to turn out. Cooking dinner can take much longer than you'd expect and baking should be done a day ahead of the event.

Watch instructional cooking shows. The most instructional of all is Alton Brown's Good Eats. He explains the methods and the science behind every recipe. Follow along as he works and you will learn so much you won't believe it. He's the Bill Nye of cooking.

3 - Equipment

A complete kitchen is a successful kitchen. Here is a list of must-haves and could-needs for every cook:

Must-have:
Quality, sharp knife set: carving [meat], santoku [vege], paring [fruit], bread [crusty foods], and a honing steel. (I will probably do a whole post about knives later.)
Spatulas (buy a 4 pack of silicone, they are the best)
Mixing bowls: the more sizes the better, glass and metal whenever possible)
Pots: Heavy bottom; anodized or ceramic non-stick surface, or stainless steel. All with lids. No aluminum interiors. Avoid Teflon
Baking pans: glass and coated metal. Again, collect a variety of sizes and shapes.)
Cooling racks
Hand mixer
Rolling pin
Instant Thermometer
Cutting boards: at least two - one for meat and one for vegetable prep; plastic is the best all around.
Hand tools: whisks, ladles, wooden spoons, slotted spoon, "pancake" turners, potato peeler,

Could need:
Stand mixer (Kitchen Aid is the best. Save up, it's worth it.)
Roasting pan
Pizza stone
Pizza peel
Pizza wheel (pizza is very special, we must take care of it)
Digital scale
Candy thermometer
Garlic press

Thanks for reading!

Writing and cooking

Wow, day two and I'm writing again!

Today I'm writing a play for a contest at a local community theater. I've been tossing the idea around in my head for a while now, and I've only recently decided that I really, truly want to be a writer. I suppose I'll write plays and novels and never make any money at it, but that's usually how it goes. I've never had more free time to do so in over a decade, so we'll see how long it lasts before I have to get a job again and burn all my energies making money for someone else.

A strange note on careers.
I never really wanted to be anything as a child except a baker. I generally liked cooking and baking, and I watched the early cooking shows on TLC before they got their own channel. This is the closest thing I ever had to a dream career, but I never went after it because no one ever told me that there are professional cooks who make a living cooking good food. There are the TV cooks, with their merchandise and cookbooks and DVDs. There are chefs with expensive restaurants in Big Cities. There are chefs who work for national chains that come up with a hundred ways to sell a burger and fries. But I've almost never seen the kind of cook I wanted to be until I saw Jamie Oliver trying to sell american kids on the idea that food can be healthy, fresh, and fun to cook. He is only six years older than me, but he inspires me with every attempt he makes to put a dent in our grease stained culture of bad food prepared a fast as possible. If I could go back and choose a new path, I'd start with a being like Jamie Oliver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Oliver